Spider a Website and Return URLs Only

Question

I\'m looking for a way to pseudo-spider a website. The key is that I don\'t actually want the content, but rather a simple list of URIs. I can get reasonably close to this i

Answer 1

Create a few regular expressions to extract the addresses from all

.

Here is the solution I would use:

wget -q http://example.com -O - | \
    tr "\t\r\n'" '   "' | \
    grep -i -o ']\+href[ ]*=[ \t]*"\(ht\|f\)tps\?:[^"]\+"' | \
    sed -e 's/^.*"\([^"]\+\)".*$/\1/g'

This will output all http, https, ftp, and ftps links from a webpage. It will not give you relative urls, only full urls.

Explanation regarding the options used in the series of piped commands:

wget -q makes it not have excessive output (quiet mode). wget -O - makes it so that the downloaded file is echoed to stdout, rather than saved to disk.

tr is the unix character translator, used in this example to translate newlines and tabs to spaces, as well as convert single quotes into double quotes so we can simplify our regular expressions.

grep -i makes the search case-insensitive grep -o makes it output only the matching portions.

sed is the Stream EDitor unix utility which allows for filtering and transformation operations.

sed -e just lets you feed it an expression.

Running this little script on "http://craigslist.org" yielded quite a long list of links:

http://blog.craigslist.org/
http://24hoursoncraigslist.com/subs/nowplaying.html
http://craigslistfoundation.org/
http://atlanta.craigslist.org/
http://austin.craigslist.org/
http://boston.craigslist.org/
http://chicago.craigslist.org/
http://cleveland.craigslist.org/
...